Destination Mars: NASA Asks Where Astronauts Should Land

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NASA has already begun trying to figure out where its first Mars
astronauts should touch down, about two decades before the
pioneers are scheduled to launch toward the Red
Planet.

The space agency will hold a workshop in Houston this October to
kick off serious discussions about possible landing sites for
NASA's first manned
Mars mission, which the agency aims to launch by the mid- to
late 2030s.

At the four-day meeting, researchers will propose roughly
62-mile-wide (100 kilometers) "exploration zones" that they
believe would be scientifically interesting and possess enough
resources, such as subsurface water ice, to support human
explorers.

"This is going to be a hot debate," Jim Green, head of NASA's
Planetary Science Division, told reporters during a
teleconference today (June 25). The October meeting, he added,
"will start exactly the conversation we need to be able to
architect what a station on
Mars would look like, and how [it] would operate."

Over the next few years, NASA plans to study the most promising
exploration zones in depth using the agency's Mars Odyssey
spacecraft and
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which began circling the
Red Planet in 2001 and 2006, respectively.

The two venerable orbiters won't last forever, so it's important
to get the ball rolling on the site-selection process now, Green
said.

"Humans are going to need high-resolution [imagery] over their
whole exploration zone," Green said, noting that MRO has captured
high-res images of just 3 percent of the Martian surface to date.
"Therefore, we need to know where they're going. It's really that
simple."